Every now and then I check out Alexa's Web stats, because they can be a good indicator of current trends. Tonight I went in and decided to see what the world's biggest websites are. Here is the current top 10 in terms of traffic:

a) Look how dominant Yahoo is - number 1 globally and Yahoo! Japan is number 4.

Let me segue into a bit of financial talk for a moment. Yahoo's market capitalization is 54.61B, compared to Google's 109.02B and Microsoft's 290.39B (data from Yahoo Finance). But as Ken Norton wrote recently, in May the market values of Google and Yahoo! were about the same. Since May however, Google's stock has almost doubled and left Yahoo for dust.

But that's just market cap. In terms of website visitor numbers and reach, Yahoo is ruling the roost.

b) The second thing that had me looking closely at the Alexa stats was how many Chinese websites are in the top 10. Baidu.com is the leading Chinese search engine and comes in at number 5 - globally. There are 3 other Chinese sites in the top 10, making 4 in total. There are 5 US sites and 1 Japanese site (derived from a US one) that make up the rest of the top 10.

On further inspection I found that the top 10 Chinese websites are in the top 35 global websites as ranked by Alexa. In comparison, there are 18 English language websites in the top 35.

It goes to show that Silicon Valley isn't the center of the Universe anymore and there is a lot of value in China, in particular. It'll be interesting to track these figures over time.